The announcement came just hours after Mark Zuckerberg published a post on Facebook defending his company's practices and saying it was tackling the problem: "We have already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes and fake news, and there is more we can do here."

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Facebook has now updated its advertising policies to specifically ban hawkers of fake news, while Google told Reuters it would "restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher's content, or the primary purpose of the web property." The spokesperson confirmed that this statement specifically referred to fake news sites. The change does not relate to content that appears in Google’s search results - the hope is instead that by vetting publishers more closely, the policy change will allow Google to cut off some of the money funding these sites.

The spread of fake news, especially on Facebook, has become a major talking point in the wake of Donald Trump's shock US presidential election victory. Earlier this week Gizmodo reported that Facebook developers had proposed an update to its News Feed algorithm that would have identified fake news stories. The proposals were canned when it became clear the update would disproportionately impact right-wing news sites by downgrading or removing dubious articles from feeds. Facebook did not respond to requests for comment.

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Since the US presidential election on November 8 Facebook in particular has been under fire about the spread of inaccurate articles among its 1.2 billion daily users.

In his 569-word status update yesterday, Zuckerberg claimed only a small portion of the links shared on Facebook are fake – "more than 99 percent of what people see is authentic". He continued to explain that he believes the 'hoax' news stories shared on his network are "not limited" to politics.

"Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other," Zuckerberg wrote.

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As Zuckerberg's behemoth has continued to grow – its 2016 third quarter financial results showed 16 percent year-on-year user growth – the way it disseminates information has come under increasing scrutiny.

In May the firm came under criticism when it fired staff working on its 'Trending News' sidebar, that provided the top links being shared on the network. The dropping of staff followed claims the human editors who had been running the trending panel had shown bias towards certain political stories. A Facebook investigation found no staff wrongdoing but could not rule out "isolated" incidents of editors making choices based on their own opinions.

Since the US presidential election, Facebook has continually denied suggestions that fake news stories being shared may have influenced voters. In an interview posted November 8, Zuckerberg said it is a "pretty crazy idea" that his network may have swayed voters.

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Although he repeated the position in his most recent Facebook post, he also said the way the News Feed works will change. "I am confident we can find ways for our community to tell us what content is most meaningful, but I believe we must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves."

"We hope to have more to share soon, although this work often takes longer than we'd like in order to confirm changes we make won't introduce unintended side effects or bias into the system."